Same as in most of Europe: The company that owns the lines is required to offer equal access to any broadband provider at cost + a reasonable margin to allow them to recoup their investments and make a profit.
The customer can then sign up with whichever ISP they want.
In some countries (such as the UK) the ISPs are also guaranteed access at "cost plus" basis to the local exchanges, so that some ISPs actually offer faster DSL connections than the company that owns the lines (BT, who owns the lines in the UK offer max 8Mbps for example, while many ISPs offer 24Mbps DSL by placing their own equipment in the exchanges).
How about servers? If you have 1000 cores, and 1000 clients connecting through the network, then each core could service a client (though depending on what they're doing, IO and other issues also rear their heads).
For some types of services, yes, but most network services are IO bound, to the point where getting the event loop right means your network service will spend most of it's time in kernel space waiting for the network driver or block device driver (for disk).
Network services WILL scale nicely with more cores, but for network bound ones it means memory and bus bandwidth needs to scale accordingly, and it'll mostly matter if you need to be able to saturate many Gbps with small-ish requests (file serving etc. is much less CPU intensive than lots of tiny messages/requsts), so it's not relevant for most people. My current servers have "only" dual gigabit ethernet, and it's trivial to saturate that with existing hardware.
Next up is disk. Scaling disk bandwidth is currently ridiculously expensive to the point where CPU often doesn't matter much for disk bound systems unless you have a ton of expensive NAS devices - you'll get more CPU power than you know what to do with if you buy cheap servers and spread the load (as an example: I'm ordering new database servers today - the ONLY driving factor for my current use is IO capacity and we're spreading it out over a small number cheap, small servers rather than buying a large storage array. Each of those servers come with 4 2.3GHz cores, and we'll rarely use more than half the capacity of one of them - still cheaper than every other solution I priced out)
Another nice aspect would be that if you could fix a process to a certain # of cores, you could always be sure that it wouldn't max out your entire CPU capacity.
Virtualization already does that for me. It would be nice to be able to pick the level of isolation on a per process group level, but that IS actually being worked on for Linux at least for memory and networking, and it'd surprise if it won't come for CPU usage as well as part of work to merge in OpenVz into the kernel as generic features.
You are making the (faulty) assumption that CS == software engineering. As a hiring manager, I couldn't care less if the programmers I hire have CS degrees. What I care about is whether they know software engineering. Sometimes the two overlaps, often it doesn't.
But I don't expect it to, because it would be like expecting that someone with a degree in linguistics would necessarily have to speak Chinese. Sure, linguistics would be a useful tool to understand and reason about Chinese, but there's no inherent overlap between that degree and the practical skills I'd be looking for if I needed someone who speaks Chinese.
You've recognized the problem, so then the logical recourse is to not rely on their degree to decide whether they are suitable candidates.
Having been on both sides of the fence (28 years since I started programming, still actively doing it, 12 years of assorted development and operations work and managing both engineering and ops teams):
Your attitude is very common with programmers - I'm surprised to hear it from someone saying they love server/network admin etc. more -, and it's one of the reasons why programmers usually make exceedingly bad network admins / sysadmins / operations engineers.
Far too many programmers tends to think they do all the cool stuff, and everyone else are just useless fluff (witness the flood of "wow, Google sounds like heaven since the project managers don't get much say" posts to an earlier article), and that lack of understanding means that a lot of programmers have no clue what (often trivial things) they can do to make life simpler for everyone else, and show scarily little appreciation for the amount of work people around them do to work around the problems caused by primadonna programmers that deliver poorly documented, badly written pieces of shit and refuse to acknowledge there are problems with their code.
I write this as someone who much prefers programming - I love it - but who very often ends up picking up the pieces, because I actually also care about operational issues, cost issues, usability issues etc. which programmers seems to like to pretend doesn't exist.
The whole POINT of nesting folders is to obscure. And removing large subsets of the messages from view makes it easier to find what I want, not harder.
Mail search just doesn't do it for me, because the mails I'm looking for does not necessarily have a unifying set of keywords. So either I add lots of tags to each message, or I just drop them in a folder and get the equivalent of 4-5 tags in one go (yes, I have folder hierarchies that deep)
I've used mail accounts with several hundred folders in a hierarchy. And no, the time does not rise exponentially, exactly because it's a hierarchy.
I've also worked with hundreds of people who've organized their e-mail that way.
Despite using Gmail now, it's still one of those things that really annoy me about it, and it wouldn't take much in terms of features to make me switch away from Gmail again.
It's just not that great. Which is why it's not "taken over" the web based mail space.
It's just not that much more compelling to typical e-mail users compared to the competition. Labels vs. folders doesn't matter to most people because they don't have enough e-mail. For those of us who do, it's deeply polarizing. I don't mind them, but I'd much rather have proper folders, and I miss coloring functionality for labeling I've had elsewhere.
I rarely, if ever, use search in mail because it's so bad (e-mails are often too short to contain the terms you try searching with, or copied/forwarded text. etc. result in bad results - with a good folder structure I find things far faster than with search).
Gmail works for my personal e-mail, but only because I get a magnitude fewer e-mails to it than to my work address. The thought of handling the projects I'm juggling in Gmail makes me shudder.
Sounds low. 3-4 years ago I had people reporting to me who worked in Bangalore. At that time the going rate for a reasonable software engineer there was around $15k, and it's been rising rapidly (at the time it was increasing around 15% year over year).
I'm sure the judge did. But the point the judge made was that the punishment was an excessive response. Some countries do actually grant kids quite wide rights, because they recognize that kids are people too, and while it is necessary to limit them somewhat for their own protection, they also need to be protected against arbitrary and excessive control by their parents.
The judge also didn't prevent the dad from punishing her or placing other restrictions on her, but upheld her complaint because of the specific circumstances, and specifically the fact that the school trip in question was a one off opportunity that was very important to her.
Well, there are two reasons for refusing knighthoods:
Either you don't want to be seen as supporting the policies of the sitting government, or you refuse it because you object to the monarchy.
In the former case, yes, you're right. In the latter, refusing it privately may well be the polite thing to do, but it also achieves absolutely nothing, whereas refusing it in public would give you a chance to make your point.
Personally I'd love a chance to show disrespect to the queen.
I turned it on, said "Wow it is fast", liked new workbench and there is that "32 bit" thing. Basically every program was already in 32bit.
All programs were "32 bit". One of the beautiful things about the 68k line of CPU's was that they were all 32 bits internally - only the width of the data and address buss was different, ranging from 8 bit on the 68008 to 16 bit on the 68000 and 68010 to 32 bit on the later ones. The address buss also increased from 24 bit on the 68000 to 32 bit.
So all programs for them were 32 bit clean from the start, apart from a few idiotic ones where people used the top 8 bits of addresses as data storage to save space, because the 68000 ignored it.
I remember a few days back on Slashdot reading a story comparing Apple employees salaries to Google salaries in Silicon Valley. Well, believe me, all the salaries in that article are very high for UK programmers.
Not really. I've managed teams in the UK where everyone was at those kind of levels. Google and Apple are hardly comparable to the typical salaries in Silicon Valley, and your typical mom and pop shop in the UK is hardly comparable to large companies, even excluding the banks (where there are plenty of developer jobs at 100k GBP and above)
Especially when you consider the high level of tax we have to pay over here.
People always bring up the tax, but the difference is exaggerated.
If you make $100k in California, you pay 9.3% state income tax. On top of that, in 2006 (too lazy to look up current numbers) you paid 22.3% federal income tax, for a total of 31.6%
$100k is ca. 50,800 GBP. For last tax year that'd be taxed at 21.8%
On top of that you'd pay about 6.3% National Insurance (for non UK people, NI covers most of the socialized healthcare, state pensions, some dental services etc.), for a whopping total of about 28.1% tax, including far more services than included in the California number.
When you factor in VAT / sales tax, then yes, you likely pay somewhat more in the UK than you would in California. On the other hand, when you factor in the cost of equivalent health insurance, pension plans and dental in California, or alternatively take the NI out of the equation, things evens out significantly again.
Low US tax rates are largely a myth - to get rates that are significantly lower than most European countries you are significantly constrained in where you live, and usually to places with lower salaries than California.
1000 years worth assuming how many reactors covering how large a percent of our energy needs?
And recoverable at what cost (money and/or energy)?
it doesn't help much if we have a 1000 years worth of fissionable material if the cost of mining a large chunk of it is so high it's not cost effective for most uses.
Not saying nuclear isn't an option, but while a number like "1,000 years worth" might sound high, it might also be very low if it's a measure of how long the materials will last at current usage levels.
But it rarely satisfies the stated purpose. How many people read patents to find out how something works? Really? Many large companies even explicitly ask staff NOT to read patents, because they'd then encounter the risk of a court finding willful infringement with resulting higher judgements, or the risk of being forced to list prior art they'd prefer not to know about.
If most patents are never actually used to find out how something works, then we get the downsides without the benefits.
I'd never hire anyone who exhibited your attitudes. I don't hire people to "do my bidding". I hire people to do a job, and that job includes providing advice on areas where they know better (or thing they do;) ), and being able to argue for why they think I'm wrong when they disagree with me.
Someone who doesn't stand up for their principles and raise their objections and put up a fight when it's something they really care about isn't a worthwhile employee. And someone who runs off like a little hurt puppy and quits without trying to change my mind first when I want to do something they think is wrong definitively isn't a worthwhile employee.
If I wanted "yes men", then the job ads would say so.
And so far that's an attitude I've shared with every manager I've had.
I've had heated arguments with every single one of them over things I thought were idiotic ideas. None of them have had a problem with that, because I've always kept it strictly about the issues at hand. If any of them HAD given me a hard time about standing up to them, then I probably would have left, as it would be a sure sign they're idiots.
If you seriously feel you were "hired to do his bidding", then I'm certainly glad you're not working for me; I don't want minions, I want professionals.
Phase 2) there is a totalitarian phase where the revolutionaries assume absolute control in order to reconstruct all of the social & economic institutions to support the new communistic structures (while crushing any attempts by the fatcats to reestablish THEIR institutions), and
You're wrong (but it's a common mistake). Go read "The State and Revolution" by Lenin. Even Lenin, who arguably later fucked up and betrayed those ideals himself, did not believe this.
The typical reason why people fail to understand the theoretical basis here is because most people only hear the superficial terminology and never bother to learn what they mean. Marx, and later Lenin, talk about the "dictatorship of the proletariat" which will exist under socialism, as the method of transitioning society to communism.
It is also perhaps one of the reasons why it's proven so easy to trick people into supporting these dictatorships, and a key reason why so many revolutions ("socialist" or otherwise) lead to oppression.
Fact of the matter is that even Lenin's works makes it clear that the proletariat of the dictatorship refers to the working classes oppressing the capitalists in the same way that the capitalists in a capitalist country oppresses the working classes, and hence a net increase in freedom (on the basis that the working classes make a larger part of the people. The whole point is to abolish the capitalist class, by taking away their privileges, and making them gradually become members of the working classes.
Since this would effectively turn them into members of the ruling class, and eventually make everyone members of the ruling class, the idea is that it would eventually lead to a classless society where the state then just "withers away" and disappears.
This is further underscored because Marx and Engels refers to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie as a way of talking of capitalist countries when they wanted to put across the point that without economic power political rights alone does not put people on equal footing.
In fact, to quote Lenin on the dictatorship of the proletariat:
Thus, in capitalist society, we have a democracy that is curtailed, poor, false; a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to Communism, will, for the first time, produce democracy for the people, for the majority, side by side with the necessary suppression of the minority-the exploiters.
This idea of "producing democracy for the people, for the majority" is much of the basis of the early introduction of the "soviets" after the overthrow of the Czar.
One of the big problems with Leninism, though, is that it also emphasizes a "revolutionary vanguard", and enforces extremely strict party discipline. Historically, most revolutionary movements regardless of their goal, tend to push for far more radical changes than the people as a whole wants - you're more likely to be prepared to take to arms if you have more reasons to be unhappy with the current regime after all.
And when you then have a very disciplined organization that has spent years or decades building themselves up under the idea of always being in danger (because they were), and that people really supports their end goals (because that's how they justify taking to arms against the current regime), you have organizations that are primed to see any resistance as proof of "counter revolution".
It's a recipe for disaster, and sufficient to pervert any ideology, no matter how much people believed or believe in it at the time of the revolution. You can see that in movements across the political spectrum - movements ranging from the far left to the far right have been seduced into using extreme violence because they "know they are right".
It's a tricky one, because sometimes overthrowing the existing regime clearly is the right choice, but the more protracted that fight is, the more chance of developing an organizational culture that has a strong "us vs. them" mentality that will extend past a victory, making it very easy for a new regime to turn to the same methods as the regime that was overthrown.
Marixsm-Leninism is not a system of government, but an ideology describing the means of achieving communism and the structure of a communist society.
One of the clearest statements of the goal of making the state "wither away" is in Lenins "The State and Revolution" which is mainly concerned exactly with the abolition of the state. For example:
Finally, only Communism renders the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is no one to be suppressed-"no one" in the sense of a class, in the sense of a systematic struggle with a definite section of the population.
Arguably that is one of the chief sources of the Marxist-Leninist view of the state.
Note that Lenin did not advocate the removal of the state immediately - on the contrary he though it necessary as a way of suppressing the capitalists after a socialist revolution. This too is firmly rooted in Marx' and Engels writings - being the basis of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" in contrast to the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" which was a term Marx' and Engels used to refer to capitalist "democracies" that oppress the poor.
What confuses people is often that what Lenin and his successors called a socialist state, people in the west started calling communist.
One can argue over whether even the socialist label of that society was true, and to what extent they followed their own supposed principles once they gained power or whether the many reprehensible actions taken were a perversion or abuse of the symbolism and support they had built with no connection to the original ideology. Regardless of which side one falls down on in that discussion, it should be quite clear that there was never even any indication from the Soviet leadership that the saw their society as communism in any shape, way or form - it was at least in name intended to be socialism.
This becomes even more clear if one studies the debates that raged in early Soviet society over how soon the transition to communism would be complete, and where depending on who and when you asked the answer might be anything from a generation in the future to hundreds of years - communism was seen as a long term goal by most people.
I want to kiss you... Well, not really, but it's a rarity to see someone else on Slashdot that actually realizes that communism involves the dismantling of the state.
The views are written using Ruby, for starters, which means a significant chunk of the code a developer working with SproutCore will actually work with is going to be Ruby.
Slashdot Mirror
The customer can then sign up with whichever ISP they want.
In some countries (such as the UK) the ISPs are also guaranteed access at "cost plus" basis to the local exchanges, so that some ISPs actually offer faster DSL connections than the company that owns the lines (BT, who owns the lines in the UK offer max 8Mbps for example, while many ISPs offer 24Mbps DSL by placing their own equipment in the exchanges).
It's what sane government regulation gets you.
I can see why you find having sex with a girl "unlikely" if you go around referring to their genitals as "junk"...
How about servers? If you have 1000 cores, and 1000 clients connecting through the network, then each core could service a client (though depending on what they're doing, IO and other issues also rear their heads).
For some types of services, yes, but most network services are IO bound, to the point where getting the event loop right means your network service will spend most of it's time in kernel space waiting for the network driver or block device driver (for disk).
Network services WILL scale nicely with more cores, but for network bound ones it means memory and bus bandwidth needs to scale accordingly, and it'll mostly matter if you need to be able to saturate many Gbps with small-ish requests (file serving etc. is much less CPU intensive than lots of tiny messages/requsts), so it's not relevant for most people. My current servers have "only" dual gigabit ethernet, and it's trivial to saturate that with existing hardware.
Next up is disk. Scaling disk bandwidth is currently ridiculously expensive to the point where CPU often doesn't matter much for disk bound systems unless you have a ton of expensive NAS devices - you'll get more CPU power than you know what to do with if you buy cheap servers and spread the load (as an example: I'm ordering new database servers today - the ONLY driving factor for my current use is IO capacity and we're spreading it out over a small number cheap, small servers rather than buying a large storage array. Each of those servers come with 4 2.3GHz cores, and we'll rarely use more than half the capacity of one of them - still cheaper than every other solution I priced out)
Another nice aspect would be that if you could fix a process to a certain # of cores, you could always be sure that it wouldn't max out your entire CPU capacity.
Virtualization already does that for me. It would be nice to be able to pick the level of isolation on a per process group level, but that IS actually being worked on for Linux at least for memory and networking, and it'd surprise if it won't come for CPU usage as well as part of work to merge in OpenVz into the kernel as generic features.
But I don't expect it to, because it would be like expecting that someone with a degree in linguistics would necessarily have to speak Chinese. Sure, linguistics would be a useful tool to understand and reason about Chinese, but there's no inherent overlap between that degree and the practical skills I'd be looking for if I needed someone who speaks Chinese.
You've recognized the problem, so then the logical recourse is to not rely on their degree to decide whether they are suitable candidates.
Your attitude is very common with programmers - I'm surprised to hear it from someone saying they love server/network admin etc. more -, and it's one of the reasons why programmers usually make exceedingly bad network admins / sysadmins / operations engineers.
Far too many programmers tends to think they do all the cool stuff, and everyone else are just useless fluff (witness the flood of "wow, Google sounds like heaven since the project managers don't get much say" posts to an earlier article), and that lack of understanding means that a lot of programmers have no clue what (often trivial things) they can do to make life simpler for everyone else, and show scarily little appreciation for the amount of work people around them do to work around the problems caused by primadonna programmers that deliver poorly documented, badly written pieces of shit and refuse to acknowledge there are problems with their code.
I write this as someone who much prefers programming - I love it - but who very often ends up picking up the pieces, because I actually also care about operational issues, cost issues, usability issues etc. which programmers seems to like to pretend doesn't exist.
Mail search just doesn't do it for me, because the mails I'm looking for does not necessarily have a unifying set of keywords. So either I add lots of tags to each message, or I just drop them in a folder and get the equivalent of 4-5 tags in one go (yes, I have folder hierarchies that deep)
I've also worked with hundreds of people who've organized their e-mail that way.
Despite using Gmail now, it's still one of those things that really annoy me about it, and it wouldn't take much in terms of features to make me switch away from Gmail again.
It's just not that great. Which is why it's not "taken over" the web based mail space.
It's just not that much more compelling to typical e-mail users compared to the competition. Labels vs. folders doesn't matter to most people because they don't have enough e-mail. For those of us who do, it's deeply polarizing. I don't mind them, but I'd much rather have proper folders, and I miss coloring functionality for labeling I've had elsewhere.
I rarely, if ever, use search in mail because it's so bad (e-mails are often too short to contain the terms you try searching with, or copied/forwarded text. etc. result in bad results - with a good folder structure I find things far faster than with search).
Gmail works for my personal e-mail, but only because I get a magnitude fewer e-mails to it than to my work address. The thought of handling the projects I'm juggling in Gmail makes me shudder.
Sounds like good preparation for the real world.
Sounds low. 3-4 years ago I had people reporting to me who worked in Bangalore. At that time the going rate for a reasonable software engineer there was around $15k, and it's been rising rapidly (at the time it was increasing around 15% year over year).
"Will start"? Indian companies started outsourcing to China, former Soviet states and Africa years ago.
The judge also didn't prevent the dad from punishing her or placing other restrictions on her, but upheld her complaint because of the specific circumstances, and specifically the fact that the school trip in question was a one off opportunity that was very important to her.
Either you don't want to be seen as supporting the policies of the sitting government, or you refuse it because you object to the monarchy.
In the former case, yes, you're right. In the latter, refusing it privately may well be the polite thing to do, but it also achieves absolutely nothing, whereas refusing it in public would give you a chance to make your point.
Personally I'd love a chance to show disrespect to the queen.
All programs were "32 bit". One of the beautiful things about the 68k line of CPU's was that they were all 32 bits internally - only the width of the data and address buss was different, ranging from 8 bit on the 68008 to 16 bit on the 68000 and 68010 to 32 bit on the later ones. The address buss also increased from 24 bit on the 68000 to 32 bit.
So all programs for them were 32 bit clean from the start, apart from a few idiotic ones where people used the top 8 bits of addresses as data storage to save space, because the 68000 ignored it.
Nah - Commodore execs were too busy being incompetent and sabotaging Amiga on their own to be that evil.
No you didn't. Netscape wasn't released (beta of 1.0) until November '94.
Because some of us wants to read the content, not spend time navigating to the content.
Not really. I've managed teams in the UK where everyone was at those kind of levels. Google and Apple are hardly comparable to the typical salaries in Silicon Valley, and your typical mom and pop shop in the UK is hardly comparable to large companies, even excluding the banks (where there are plenty of developer jobs at 100k GBP and above)
Especially when you consider the high level of tax we have to pay over here.People always bring up the tax, but the difference is exaggerated.
If you make $100k in California, you pay 9.3% state income tax. On top of that, in 2006 (too lazy to look up current numbers) you paid 22.3% federal income tax, for a total of 31.6%
$100k is ca. 50,800 GBP. For last tax year that'd be taxed at 21.8%
On top of that you'd pay about 6.3% National Insurance (for non UK people, NI covers most of the socialized healthcare, state pensions, some dental services etc.), for a whopping total of about 28.1% tax, including far more services than included in the California number.
When you factor in VAT / sales tax, then yes, you likely pay somewhat more in the UK than you would in California. On the other hand, when you factor in the cost of equivalent health insurance, pension plans and dental in California, or alternatively take the NI out of the equation, things evens out significantly again.
Low US tax rates are largely a myth - to get rates that are significantly lower than most European countries you are significantly constrained in where you live, and usually to places with lower salaries than California.
And recoverable at what cost (money and/or energy)?
it doesn't help much if we have a 1000 years worth of fissionable material if the cost of mining a large chunk of it is so high it's not cost effective for most uses.
Not saying nuclear isn't an option, but while a number like "1,000 years worth" might sound high, it might also be very low if it's a measure of how long the materials will last at current usage levels.
If most patents are never actually used to find out how something works, then we get the downsides without the benefits.
Just like highly profitable telemarketing operations, you mean?
Someone who doesn't stand up for their principles and raise their objections and put up a fight when it's something they really care about isn't a worthwhile employee. And someone who runs off like a little hurt puppy and quits without trying to change my mind first when I want to do something they think is wrong definitively isn't a worthwhile employee.
If I wanted "yes men", then the job ads would say so.
And so far that's an attitude I've shared with every manager I've had.
I've had heated arguments with every single one of them over things I thought were idiotic ideas. None of them have had a problem with that, because I've always kept it strictly about the issues at hand. If any of them HAD given me a hard time about standing up to them, then I probably would have left, as it would be a sure sign they're idiots.
If you seriously feel you were "hired to do his bidding", then I'm certainly glad you're not working for me; I don't want minions, I want professionals.
You're wrong (but it's a common mistake). Go read "The State and Revolution" by Lenin. Even Lenin, who arguably later fucked up and betrayed those ideals himself, did not believe this.
The typical reason why people fail to understand the theoretical basis here is because most people only hear the superficial terminology and never bother to learn what they mean. Marx, and later Lenin, talk about the "dictatorship of the proletariat" which will exist under socialism, as the method of transitioning society to communism.
It is also perhaps one of the reasons why it's proven so easy to trick people into supporting these dictatorships, and a key reason why so many revolutions ("socialist" or otherwise) lead to oppression.
Fact of the matter is that even Lenin's works makes it clear that the proletariat of the dictatorship refers to the working classes oppressing the capitalists in the same way that the capitalists in a capitalist country oppresses the working classes, and hence a net increase in freedom (on the basis that the working classes make a larger part of the people. The whole point is to abolish the capitalist class, by taking away their privileges, and making them gradually become members of the working classes.
Since this would effectively turn them into members of the ruling class, and eventually make everyone members of the ruling class, the idea is that it would eventually lead to a classless society where the state then just "withers away" and disappears.
This is further underscored because Marx and Engels refers to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie as a way of talking of capitalist countries when they wanted to put across the point that without economic power political rights alone does not put people on equal footing.
In fact, to quote Lenin on the dictatorship of the proletariat:
Thus, in capitalist society, we have a democracy that is curtailed, poor, false; a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to Communism, will, for the first time, produce democracy for the people, for the majority, side by side with the necessary suppression of the minority-the exploiters.This idea of "producing democracy for the people, for the majority" is much of the basis of the early introduction of the "soviets" after the overthrow of the Czar.
One of the big problems with Leninism, though, is that it also emphasizes a "revolutionary vanguard", and enforces extremely strict party discipline. Historically, most revolutionary movements regardless of their goal, tend to push for far more radical changes than the people as a whole wants - you're more likely to be prepared to take to arms if you have more reasons to be unhappy with the current regime after all.
And when you then have a very disciplined organization that has spent years or decades building themselves up under the idea of always being in danger (because they were), and that people really supports their end goals (because that's how they justify taking to arms against the current regime), you have organizations that are primed to see any resistance as proof of "counter revolution".
It's a recipe for disaster, and sufficient to pervert any ideology, no matter how much people believed or believe in it at the time of the revolution. You can see that in movements across the political spectrum - movements ranging from the far left to the far right have been seduced into using extreme violence because they "know they are right".
It's a tricky one, because sometimes overthrowing the existing regime clearly is the right choice, but the more protracted that fight is, the more chance of developing an organizational culture that has a strong "us vs. them" mentality that will extend past a victory, making it very easy for a new regime to turn to the same methods as the regime that was overthrown.
One of the clearest statements of the goal of making the state "wither away" is in Lenins "The State and Revolution" which is mainly concerned exactly with the abolition of the state. For example:
Finally, only Communism renders the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is no one to be suppressed-"no one" in the sense of a class, in the sense of a systematic struggle with a definite section of the population.Arguably that is one of the chief sources of the Marxist-Leninist view of the state.
Note that Lenin did not advocate the removal of the state immediately - on the contrary he though it necessary as a way of suppressing the capitalists after a socialist revolution. This too is firmly rooted in Marx' and Engels writings - being the basis of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" in contrast to the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" which was a term Marx' and Engels used to refer to capitalist "democracies" that oppress the poor.
What confuses people is often that what Lenin and his successors called a socialist state, people in the west started calling communist.
One can argue over whether even the socialist label of that society was true, and to what extent they followed their own supposed principles once they gained power or whether the many reprehensible actions taken were a perversion or abuse of the symbolism and support they had built with no connection to the original ideology. Regardless of which side one falls down on in that discussion, it should be quite clear that there was never even any indication from the Soviet leadership that the saw their society as communism in any shape, way or form - it was at least in name intended to be socialism.
This becomes even more clear if one studies the debates that raged in early Soviet society over how soon the transition to communism would be complete, and where depending on who and when you asked the answer might be anything from a generation in the future to hundreds of years - communism was seen as a long term goal by most people.
I want to kiss you... Well, not really, but it's a rarity to see someone else on Slashdot that actually realizes that communism involves the dismantling of the state.
The views are written using Ruby, for starters, which means a significant chunk of the code a developer working with SproutCore will actually work with is going to be Ruby.